Honeybees’ basic strategy is to maximise return over a broad geographic area and extended time horizon. Bees have to assess their environment at all times and be prepared to adapt depending on the weather conditions, the time of the year, the type of flowers and the competition for nectar with birds and other insects. Bees are heavily invested in research and development, constantly on the lookout for the next best thing while taking in revenues from the current sources. Scout bees monitor the number of sites at any given time to ensure they will be the most profitable. Companies need, just like bees, to invest in developing their employees, understanding their customers’ needs, and continually innovate to keep up with today’s market demand.

Assessing your internal customers: Why?

Assessing your internal customer is now widely recognised as a vital input to any strategy for customer-focused business performance improvement.

Satisfying internal customers could be described as a company’s ability to generate genuine teamwork among all departments in the organisation and the need to improve processes, responsiveness and reduce overheads is focusing management attention on the major internal business functions, such as sales, marketing, credit and receivables, manufacturing, distribution, packing and shipping, quality, production planning, etc.; and to instill in every individual the constant awareness that customer service is everyone’s business.

Assessing your external customers: Why?

Understanding customers is the key to giving them good service. To give good customer care you must deliver what you promise. But exceptional customer care involves getting to know your customers so well that not only do you meet your customers’ expectations but you can anticipate their needs and exceed their expectations.

To understand your customers’ needs, your employees need to have extremely good communication skills; listening, asking the right questions at the right time is all part of the sales process.

By building a rapport with your customers, being genuinely interested in their needs, and what’s in it for them, not you, they will reward you with their custom and loyalty.

Assessing – your environment: Why?

Because the business environment is constantly changing, businesses need to develop a marketing audit and this should be used as a reference tool, with constant updates reflecting changes in the external environment and your own internal business experiences. It would enable you to assess past and present performance as well as to provide the basis for evaluating possible future courses of action.

The market environment is a marketing term and refers to factors and forces that affect a company’s ability to build and maintain successful relationships with customers.

While you can measure strategy performance against targets, an assessment of your company’s marketing strategy goes further. In addition to evaluating performance, it is important to look at exactly how key internal and external influences had an impact on the performance variables. It examines how you measure company performance and how sustainable any performance increases are likely to be over the longer term. An effective marketing strategy assessment can have a significant impact on the bottom line.